The lonely people buried in graves of garbage

It was one of José Ángel’s 3,544 friends from the social networks who phoned the police in Vigo, Galicia, to report the 51-year-old’s absence from Facebook and WhatsApp. Acquainted only with his online persona, the woman was unaware he lived under a mountain of garbage that he added to every evening after making his rounds of the local dumpsters; nor that his home was so stuffed with trash that he had to climb in and out of it through a window.

The story was widely reported in the northwestern port city, but no one has claimed his body. The local authorities gave him a paupers’ funeral, and the only trace of his existence is a Facebook page and a small cross in the Pereiró cemetery with the number 113 on it.

The authorities in Madrid receive around 300 complaints a year about people hoarding trash in their homes

José Ángel suffered from what is known as Diogenes Syndrome, a condition that drives people to compulsively hoard garbage. Last January, a 62-year-old man from Asturias, along with an 84-year-old woman in Cáceres, were found in similar circumstances. At the beginning of this month, emergency services were called out to the home of a 79-year-old woman in Erandio, near Bilbao, who they assumed to be dead due to the stench from inside the property, although she died just minutes after they arrived. What made José Ángel, 51, different to other sufferers was his online activity.

Of the handful of people with DS who are found dead each year in Spain, some die of starvation or illness, while others are sometimes buried alive when the garbage they amass collapses on top of them. In winter, it is not unusual for sufferers to light cardboard and wooden boxes in an effort to keep warm, sometimes setting off fires in their homes.

Typically isolated, most sufferers are not found for days or weeks after their death, and sometimes the authorities are only alerted months later.

This can make it hard to identify bodies, which will often be in an advanced state of decomposition. In 2012, a 70-year-old woman was found in A Coruña two months after her death, partially eaten by rats.

In most cases, overstretched social workers are aware of people in the community with DS, but admit they are able to do little to help sufferers or to provide practical assistance to neighbors who must put up with the hygiene problems sufferers can create.

According to the Madrid College of Property Administrators, 60% of inquiries by residents’ associations are about what to do with neighbors with DS: the authorities in Madrid receive around 300 complaints a year about people hoarding trash in their homes.

In 2010, the authorities in Almería entered 34 homes filled with refuse, while four DS sufferers died after being admitted to hospital. A 57-year-old man from Málaga died in hospital the same year after being rescued from his burning home. The local council had failed to have him admitted to a psychiatric unit, although it was able to empty the apartment and repaint it, however, within a few years he had filled it again.

DS sufferers who start fires to keep warm pose grave problems for their neighbors. In March last year, a 51-year-old DS sufferer set a building in Palma ablaze, which took firefighters five hours to put out. Most sufferers live alone and have no family contact. Psychiatrists say they typically have low self-esteem and they live in a state of perpetual self-neglect.

In some extreme cases, DS sufferers hoard pets as well as trash. In the small town of Rianxo, in A Coruña, the local authorities waded through tons of refuse to rescue two elderly women and 140 sick dogs, more than half of which had to be put down.

One of the women lived in a bed with the animals piled in beside her. The other woman was blind and was still waiting for some form of support she was entitled to by law years later.

English version by Heather Galloway.